December 27, 2007

how not to do things with words

The other day Roberta Smith touched on a depressing fact I've been lamenting for years: "Referencing — rather than referring to — is probably here to stay." Too true, and very unfortunate, as there's no need for the grating tick of "referencing." I'm not entirely sure its origin lies in academia, though it's certainly found there, as I've heard it used in business and the social services for a very long time (if it is originally an academic coinage, I wouldn't be surprised if it came out of business or administration schools, or professional training for social workers, for that matter, but that's just a guess.) That said, it's deployed in artists' statements and critical writing just as frequently, and never fails to annoy. Die, die, die.

As for Smith's other targets, I plead guilty to (mis)using "privileging" more times than I care to count, and I doubt I'll ever completely stop. I make no claim for its attractiveness, but at the least it has a (distinctly academic) pedigree, if perhaps one that antagonizes in an inappropriate context (and I think using it to mystify criticism counts as one.) I don't think I'd use it much here, or in most of what I'd write, but when occasionally deployed to signal in certain intellectual directions it doesn't bother me so much. The real point of contention, though, at least judging by the divergent takes of Eva Lake and Regina Hackett, comes with "practice."

I'm with Regina on this one: "practice," when used to describe an artist's work, methods, etc., seems to me neither inaccurate nor linguistically bothersome. I can even call upon its usage in poetry as support. From Howard Nemerov's "The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House," these lines on Paul Klee:

For such a man, art is an act of faith:Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,And praise the practice; nor does he divideMaking from teaching or from theory.The three are one, and in his hours of artThere shines a happiness through darkest themes,As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

That practice connotes a form of discipline seems to me to make it even more appropriate. But to look at the question in a way Nemerov's description perhaps suggests: isn't a debate over the propriety of using "practice" to describe artistic work really a conflict over different ideas of the relation of art to life? Here's Roberta, arguing against practice:

Second is the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or
dentist, is trained to fix some external problem. It depersonalizes the
urgency of art making and gives it an aura of control, as if it is all
planned out ahead of time. Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix
anything beyond the artist’s own, subjective needs.

And here's Eva:

[The word "practice"] doesn’t describe at all what an artist is doing. Art is not
something you do in your studio. It is not something I worked on
yesterday afternoon from 2 to 6pm.

Perhaps my old neighbor said it best. We grew up together but I hadn’t
seen her in years, decades. She had the great wisdom to define what I
became better than I could. She was a nuclear physicist too! But she
said: “When I leave my job, it’s over. But you are always an artist.”

I can see what both of them are saying, though I'm not sure all artists feel exactly the same, or at least to the point of objecting to describing their "practice." One can point to artists, such as our patron saint Mondrian, whose work--whatever its profound internal impulse--found its mature expression in a very externalized, formalized set of, well, practices, in which different aesthetic ends were demonstrated by experimentation within imposed limits. The connotation of legal practice or business practices may seem dreary to many, and hence discredit the word; but I'm not sure there haven't been many artists who haven't thought of their work as akin to scientific practice.

To conclude with a more obvious point, one that Nemerov foregrounds in his analogy above: we quite easily speak of someone practicing religion, and I don't think that when we do we are denying that their faith stands as a very personal and important part of who they are and their relation to the world. Quite the opposite (the connection between practice and discipline again seems relevant.) That they are a practicing Buddhist, Christian, what-have-you, is a central part of their identity and being. And so it may be with artistic practice, at least in those happy moments when spirit and sense are not at odds.

Comments

I loved this - and especially the bit about Mondrian. But I think I could also use him equally as someone who does not merely "practice" art from 2 to 6pm. De Stijl, at least to me, is about an endless, seamless take on life, with everything being art, right down to the bed. For me, that is not an activity so much as a way of living and being.

You're absolutely right about Mondrian, of course--one can take his example both ways (this is not the home of a man who leaves his work at the office, after all.) And he happily predicted "the end of art as a thing separated from our surrounding environment,"; perhaps the difference between Piet and later advocates of mixing art and life is that he thought the former would transform the latter rather than the other way around. At the same time, he frequently wrote about art as a sort of process of investigating the "natural laws" of art, of purifying art to lay bare essential truths and not mere individual expressions, etc. So there's also a context in which he describes art as an externalized, experimental, scientific practice. It's the fact that art does cut both ways, at least when it's working, that makes it both something that's very deeply part of what someone is as well as something beyond any one individual. And while I can think of artists coming down on both sides of the "practice" question, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that artists might be more acutely aware that there are different sides.

I suppose it would be more proper to have written something like "places in the foreground," but I hardly think the word "foreground" amounts to jargon--it's an entirely standard term, Neither usage offends my ear, at least. At the risk of a very tedious debate breaking out, I'd also say that I'm not at all entirely opposed to what sometimes gets labeled as "jargon" and dislike knee-jerk reacts to academic terminology. The latter has its own place and use, however unappealing it may be out of those. One of the things I didn't like about Smith's article, and tried to indicate a little, was her basing her objections on the alleged academic nature of the offenses. That may be part of the story, but runs the risk of a certain kind of know-nothingism that I don't find attractive.

I prove every day that practice won't make me perfect, nor do I want to be, but it dose allow me to be more skillful in whatever I do. Making art, music, cooking, Yoga, life; to appreciate to the fullest requires passion and (a)practice.